1. Field of the Invention
The present general inventive concept relates to a system to control an operating clock frequency of a hard disk drive, and more particularly, to a method of adaptively controlling an operating clock frequency of a hard disk drive according to an operating environment of the hard disk drive by analyzing a command workload, a recording medium to record the method, and a hard disk drive using the method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Performance of hard disk drives increases in proportion to an operating clock frequency. However, when the operating clock frequency is increased to increase the performance of a hard disk drive, power consumption of the hard disk drive is also increased.
A low operating clock frequency is usually used in mobile drives to decrease power consumption. However, high performance of a drive may be required depending on an environment in which the drive is used. In some instances, low power consumption may be more desirable than high performance. For example, when a quantity of command workload is large like in a compiling or rendering operation, the high performance of a hard disk drive is required, and therefore, the hard disk drive needs to be operated at a high operating clock frequency. On the other hand, when the hard disk drive is used to see movies, the low power consumption takes precedence over the performance, and therefore, the hard disk drive needs to be operated at the low operating clock frequency.
A command workload indicates a total number of write/read commands received by a hard disk drive during a predetermined reference time. Accordingly, when an amount of operation increases in the hard disk drive, the command workload also increases.
As described above, priority between high performance and low power consumption in a hard disk drive may change according to an operating environment of the hard disk drive. Accordingly, when the operating clock frequency of the hard disk drive is fixed, the hard disk drive cannot be used efficiently in various operating environments.